By the Keepers of Magical Tales | Crystal Conjure Magic
In an earlier letter we said something plain: if you do not believe in magic, you will never find any. We meant the magic of being alive in a world that is, by any honest reckoning, extraordinary — and we said the only thing standing between a person and that world is whether they have kept the door open or let it swing shut.
Say you have kept it open. Say you are willing. Then here is the next thing worth saying, and it is not an argument this time. It is an invitation to look.
Because you are here for a very short while. That is not said to frighten you. It is said because it is the single most astonishing fact about your situation and the one most completely ignored: that you exist at all, briefly, with eyes that work and a mind that wonders, inside something enormous and old that was here long before you and will go on long after — and that for a handful of decades you get to look at it. That is the whole of the offer. Nobody gets more. And most of it goes by unwatched.
So let us watch some of it, together, before it does.
Water
There is a river somewhere near you, or a stream, or only the rain. Stand at it a moment. That water has been falling and rising and falling again since long before there were people to watch it — up into the sky as nothing you can see, down again as everything, the same water, around and around, for an unthinkable stretch of time. It carved the valley you live in. It is in you right now, most of you, by weight. The glass on your table and the sea and the cloud and your own blood are the same substance taking turns. You can know every word of the science of it and it does not shrink even slightly. It only gets stranger. A person could spend a life on the fact of water alone and come to the end of it still amazed.
A seed
Put one in the ground. A dry, hard, unpromising thing, no bigger than a fingernail, that looks for all the world like a small stone. And then wait, and it does the impossible thing it has always done: it splits itself open and reaches, one part down into the dark and one part up toward a light it has never seen and somehow knows is there. Out of nearly nothing it builds a stem, then a leaf, then — given years — a tree taller than your house, heavy enough to break a road, and it does all of it out of sunlight and dirt and water and time. There is no trick you could be shown that would be more remarkable than this, and it is happening in every field and every crack in every pavement, constantly, while we walk past thinking of other things.
The light
The particular light of an afternoon, late, when it comes in low and gold and lands on an ordinary wall and makes it briefly holy. You have seen it. Everyone has. It is only dust and angle and the sun eight minutes gone, and it will not last more than a quarter of an hour, and it will never fall exactly that way again. There are afternoons like that stored in you from decades ago — a room, a season, a slant of light — that you can still walk into when you close your eyes, more vivid than yesterday. That you can carry a fifteen-minute fall of light for thirty years is itself one of the strange facts nobody remarks on. You are a creature that keeps light.
The people
And this is the one that ought to stop us in the street, and almost never does. That there are people who know you. That out of all the staggering number of lives, a few have wound themselves around yours — that someone learned your voice and would pick it out of a crowd, that someone is glad, in a plain unspectacular way, that you exist. We treat this as the ordinary furniture of a life. It is not ordinary. It is the least ordinary thing there is: that in a cold and enormous universe two brief creatures should find each other and matter to each other for a while. Every person who loves you is a small impossibility you have stopped noticing.
Yourself
Look at your own hand. Turn it over. It has done everything you have ever done and you have almost never once looked at it. It mends itself when it is cut. It knew how to grasp before you were born. Behind it is a body running ten thousand processes you never think about and could not begin to manage on purpose, keeping you alive through this sentence and the next, asking nothing of your attention — a whole quiet machinery of being, running under the floor of your life, so that you, the part that gets to look out and wonder, can be free to do exactly that. You did not earn it and you cannot keep it, and for now it is yours.
The shortness is the point
None of this is hidden. That is what we most want you to understand. It is not behind a veil, not reserved for the initiated, not waiting on any belief more complicated than a willingness to stop and look. It is standing in plain sight, all of it, all the time — the water and the seed and the light and the people and the improbable fact of your own two hands — and the only thing that ever keeps a person from it is being too busy, too hurried, too settled in the story that it is all ordinary and already understood and not worth the pause.
It is not ordinary. It was never ordinary. We simply arrived, and got used to it fast, the way you get used to anything, and mistook familiar for explained.
You have a short while here. A genuinely short while, in the scheme of the thing — a brief turn through a world so strange and so full that no one has ever come close to seeing the whole of it, and you will not either, and that is all right. But you can see more of it than you are seeing. You can stop, more often than you do, at the river and the light and the face across the table, and let yourself be amazed by what is actually there, which is everything.
That is the magic we meant. Not something you must believe against the evidence. Something you must not be too hurried to notice while you are lucky enough to be here at all.
Keep the door open. And then, while there is time — go and look.
The world does not ask you to believe it is astonishing. It only asks, now and then, that you stop long enough to catch it being so.
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